Luke Ravensthal/tidbits
From the Bloomfield-Garfield Corp newsletter in March 2008 Last month, I asked Pittsburghers to share what they love about our great city as part of a Valentine’s Day Contest. The impressive number of heartfelt and sincere responses was inspiring, but not surprising. As I have said time and again, Pittsburgh is a city of neighborhoods and residents. Pittsburghers have made Pittsburgh all that it is. We must continue to stay positive, talking about all of the things that make us proud. Whether it's our sports teams, our cultural district, or simply our friendly people, this is a place to go to school, go to work, raise your children, and retire. Pittsburgh has it all. As we continue to preserve our rich history and traditions, we are making changes to ensure that we continue to grow, attract, and maintain residents and businesses, and also to create the cleanest and safest city possible. I want to keep Pittsburgh a place that you are proud to call home, and we are taking proactive measures to ensure that you can. Working with the Pittsburgh Bureau of Police, we have answered the call to re-establish a proactive police presence in our neighborhoods. I pledged to reinvest in the "beat cop" program last year. The beat cop program is now up and running. Police Chief Nathan Harper has assigned four beat cops to each of the city's six police zones. Zone commanders will assign the officers to business districts based on community need and crime-data analysis. Public safety is not just about eliminating crime in a neighborhood. We must eliminate the blight and abandonment that encourages and accepts criminal activity. I doubled the demolition budget for 2008, and set a goal of bringing down many more structures this year. We are taking a new look at an old problem, changing the way we prioritize demolition to change the face of our neighborhoods. My administration held meetings with the city’s economic development and public safety departments, charging them with the arduous task of overhauling the city’s demolition process. The former process was too reactive, and in order to confront the problem and to make any real changes, we needed to be proactive. We have worked together to find new ways to tackle hazardous, crime-ridden structures as quickly and efficiently as possible. The city’s most dangerous structures will continue to be torn down as a first priority, sometimes resulting in scattered demolition bids. However, through the revised approach, the city’s public safety and economic development bureaus are now working together to create another layer: geographical second-tier demo-zones. City taxpayers will get more for their money when we designate demolitions in close proximity to each other, and with the new process, we will not simply be razing houses. The remaining vacant lots must become assets to their communities. We will be aggressively implementing greening strategies to create further economic development opportunities in our neighborhoods. As spring approaches, we will continue to clean up and green up the city. I ask that you, too, help in our efforts to proactively address the problems facing our neighborhoods, so that we can continue to take pride in Pittsburgh.